Aishwarya Iyengar
Service Designer, User Researcher & Design Educator
User-test findings turned into a service design project!
Problem statement
General IT End Users and IT Supporters who are keen on giving feedback on IT Services, and articles, miss a structured way to provide feedback in the IT Service Portal, leading the Product team to miss the chance to collect valuable feedback for an evolving product like IT Service Portal. This further leads to Content Creators and Service owners to miss critical feedback on the content developed for IT products.
IT End user view
When we conducted user test on an IT platform that provides solutions & contact channels for employees, we learnt that many users are keen on providing feedback for services they use or the articles they read and see a need for improvement.
On the other hand, there are also user personas that may not have the motivation to give feedback for an IT based platform between their busy work schedule.
IT Supporters' View
We also conducted user tests with IT supporters on their Dashboard to understand their perspective of giving feedback on articles used to support end users. Majority of them said that they would love to review articles and give feedback as it directly impacts their work and improving it means it makes their work easy.
A few of them strongly felt that sharing feedback does not come naturally to them and would not care much to allocate time between their everyday tasks.
Let's look at a couple of personas that we need to consider while designing a feedback concept.
IT End user | Persona 1
Mike
IT Service User
Enthusiastic . Tech Savvy . Time-poor
Enjoys solving his problem on his own
Adam is motivated to leave feedback whenever he feels there is need for improvement in content or service.
He often is the one helping his colleagues to solve their IT issues.
When he gives feedback on content/ service, he likes to leave a comment so that it is useful to the receiver.
Mike would be delighted to know when his feedback is considered, and misses this last mile connect.
IT End user | Persona 2
Samantha
May
Marketing Executive
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me.
Rebecca
IT Service User
Multitasker . Efficient. Time-poor
Rebecca is a multitasker, and has many responsibilities in her role as a Team leader.
Rebecca likes to have all IT Interruptions out of her way when she focuses on her primary tasks.
Rebecca doesn't remember giving extensive feedback on any content she has used in the IT space.
Rebecca seeks a much easier way to give feedback if at all, because if she doesn't have spare time she wouldn't consider leaving elaborate feedback message.
The Approach
There were 3 Directions that emerged from our research.
1 Feedback concept on both portals needed to be simplified, intuitive and capture both qualitative & quantitative inputs for feedback receivers. (Service Owner/content creators)
Design move: Re-design Feedback concept for end user portal
2. Although there is evidence from qualitative data that users are keen on giving feedback, we had a hunch that these are rather fitting a particular persona and we may not have a clear representative of a persona that does not have the time/ interest in giving feedback. This led to the 2nd direction of validating how users use this function of feedback and what kind of feedback is currently been given.
Design move: Collaborate with Data science team to identify usage patterns across demographics.
3 At the moment there is no system created to connect the dots and route the feedback coming from both these systems to the Service owners & Content Creators, as both these are new platforms.
Design move: Conduct Research on what is seen as "Valuable feedback" and "a valuable way of receiving it" by Service providers & content creators, which will in-turn define the design solution.
DIRECTION 1
How might we enable users to give feedback in an easy, intuitive manner on Search quality, Content and Design of the IT page?
DIRECTION 2
How do our content creators and product-service owners want to receive feedback so that they can easily implement the changes?
DIRECTION 3
How can we validate the usage of Feedback functions with the use of quantitative data patterns.
think
1. Primary Research
2. Analysis & Synthesis
3. Top Findings
4. Design Directions
make
1. Co-design workshops for feedback design
2. Refining concepts in design team
3. Create Metrics for Data team, so that UX team can draw value from it
4. Imagine how the Feedback routing & response might look and propose to the product & technical teams.
test
1. Conduct user tests on 4 concepts of feedback collection
2. Refine Concept & create user stories to take into development for next release.
Top Findings
DIRECTION 2
These were top findings from the Service owner & content creators.
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"The more we know, the more it benefits us to improve our services & content."
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"At the moment, there is huge gap, because we rarely receive specific feedback from our end users."
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"Qualitative feedback will help us all to know exactly where we are missing the point, and we will proactively work on it!"
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"We often get mixed feedback from multiple platforms, so filtering it is a whole lot of mundane tasks, and after all that we are left with very less useful feedback. "
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"Sometimes, it is not very clear what the user is referring to, it can be vague and disconnected."
The direction
We looked at our findings from the Service side and the End user side, leading us to synthesize top 5 things we could do in the short term to make this feedback concept viable and useful to both sides.
1. Feedback interface must be simple, least time consuming and give the user the ability to provide qualitative feedback with less effort.
2. Feedback collected should be categorized and filtered already when it reaches the Service owners to reduce manual effort.
3. We must increase the number of qualitative feedback received as this is valuable input for the Service Organization.
The co-design workshop
Based on these directions we formulated ideation sessions within the design team to imagine how this feedback concept could look like. There were several ideas on getting users to give continuous feedback in their service journey, but we kept hitting the part of "least effort" and more automatic possibilities.
We came up with 4 key concepts combining topic groups, tags for quick selection, different ways to provide rating, adding social elements to encourage feedback, open text fields, and a number of placement ideas that would draw the user's attention. These were rigorously tested, and the Design team prepared 'One Unifying Concept' based on the learning from usability tests.
Some highlights of the features,
1. Progressive disclosure of feedback options
User can simply drop a star-rating and leave, but he may be presented with tags after he has given the star rating. All the user needs to do is select relevant tags for e.g.,, the 'content was not understandable'. The tags presented would be based on the star rating. (positive key phrases for higher ratings, and correspondingly for average & negative feedback.)
2. Feedback anywhere and everywhere:
When a user is sifting through knowledge articles, he may want to specifically point out an error or missing content. For this we would provide the possibility to highlight pre-select areas, and give instant feedback on it. Similar to the above, qualitative feedback can be with tags and written text, upto the user.
Next steps
These design concepts are planned to be tested and released.
DIRECTION 3
These were top learnings from data interpretations
Over 3 months of observation, only 5% of End users give active feedback.
Most of them have given feedback on the trigger stemming from a bad experience.
Most users leave content related feedback.
Written feedback still remains largely incomprehensible, and connecting the dots with specific search sessions is high manual effort.
Next steps
The data team and UX team will continue to watch the data patterns over a period of 6 months, and after the release of new functionalities, to then make design improvements.